Spring 2008 Featured Poet: Four Poems by Joop Bersee

Elvis died.
We know.
He died,
rolled up
his sleeping bag,
became very small,
a comma in the ground.

He died his personal death.
We all.
I will die, my way.
My own,
personal,
unique way,
rolling up,
disappearing,
comma
in the ground.
My unique way.
I hold this in my hands.
And I feel safe.
Secure.

NOT HER DREAM

I don’t even know
if she is still alive.
But, if I would meet her,
see her, in a dream,

she’d walk out. Yes.
And her face is a
Käthe Kolwitz,
because she looks at me.

Then she’d turn
her face and walk
out of my dream.
Not her dream.

K.B. HARBOUR, CAPE TOWN

In memory I feel being hurt,
fishing boats anchored to colourful
ropes, the white red light-house
on its pier where I once sat in cold

pee, two boys fishing at night.
The weather clearing, walking lives,
never growing bored, wearing the
red or pink sun, the wet hours

enduring waves, and more more waves,
finger waiting in light or darkness,
singular, people passing, before us,

after, cutting hours, cleaning fish, their death
staring eyes always blind, growing
more tired with each day passing.

JUST A THING

Here I sit,
with my bones in this world,
with my grandfather’s legs.
He disappeared in the rain of time,
ground, watch and the minutes
ticking in my inner ear,
a candle when it gets dark.
He really was one of us, like us.
But now he is one of them,
horrors of the green, quiet,
nightingale cemeteries,
a child’s soul on someone’s
name, just a thing, not related.